Updated to describe the requested code; the updates are at the end.
I'm trying to do something that seems like it should be simple but the Android Life Cycle doesn't seem to be working as described. I expect this is a misunderstanding on my part, not a bug in Android!
I am new to Android and am just getting familiar with the Android Life Cycle after developing Java apps for Windows so I'm still struggling with a lot of new ideas, especially the Life Cycle.
I have nearly finished my first app, which is based on a RecyclerView. It shows a bunch of sales records (each representing one sale) of a small company. Users can click on a FloatingActionButton to report a new sale or click on edit or remove icons on the individual records to change the details of a sale or delete it entirely. Each of these things has its own activity. Also, there is a SettingsActivity to show settings.
One of the settings lets the user select from amongst three different date formats for displaying the date of the sale. When I back out of Settings (by hitting the back button), I want to see the visible rows using the newly-changed date format immediately but this is NOT happening. Up until now, I would just click on the buttons to take me to one of the other activities, then click the cancel button when I get there; on returning to my main activity, I would see the new date format.
I don't feel my user should have to go to that other activity; simply returning from Settings should change the dates immediately. I started looking at the Android Life Cycle. As I read the documentation, I should be overriding the onResume() method and issuing a notifyDataChanged() to the Adapter that controls the RecyclerView to get it to rebind the visible rows, using the new date format.
Unfortunately, that has no effect whatever that I can see. Here's my onResume:
#Override
protected void onResume() {
super.onResume();
mAdapter.notifyDataSetChanged();
}
Am I doing the notifyDataSetChanged() in the wrong method? If not, why doesn't it work? If it is the wrong method, which method should I be overriding?
Is there any particularly good text or video tutorial explaining the Life Cycle that I should be reading or viewing?
Updates
The date format is set in my SettingsActivity, which is the default one provided in the SettingsActivity template, tailored to meet my needs. All I've touched is the General settings. I replaced all of the ones from the template with six of my own settings. One is called Date format and defaults to YYYY-MM-DD; there are two other choices.
My main activity, which is the one that invokes SettingsActivity via a menu option, gets the value of the date format from the default SharedPreferences. This is because I don't want to look up the value of the Date format once for every row in the ArrayList but just once for all the rows in the ArrayList. I pass the value of the Date format to the Adapter via its constructor. The format gets used in OnBindViewHolder() to control the appearance of the date on the various sales records.
Define a set method to your adapter,
public class MyAdapter extends RecyclerView.Adapter<AdapterContactList.ViewHolder> {
private String dateFormat;
.....
public void setDateFormat(String dateFormat) {
this.dateFormat = dateFormat;
}
}
After user change the dateformat; set it to your adapter, then notify datas for change. That means, you need set new dateformat before notifyDataSetChanged method; because adapter doesn't know the new value.
#Override
protected void onResume() {
super.onResume();
String newDateFormat = getFromSharedPreferencesOrInstantly();
mAdapter.setDateFormat(newDateFormat);
mAdapter.notifyDataSetChanged();
}
Related
I am making a calculator same as windows calculator. I am stuck at the history feature. which would be the best UI control to implement the history feature as seen in Windows Calculator?
I also want onclick events on the history.
I'm not sure how you represent a calculation, but you could have a simple class like this:
enum Operator {PLUS,MINUS,DIV,MULT};
class Calculation {
float operand1,operand2;
Operator operator;
public Calculation(float op1,float op2,Operator operator){
this.operand1=op1;
this.operand1=op2;
this.operator=operator;
}
}
Then when a calculation is done, create an object of this type and add it to an ArrayList:
List<Calculation> history = new ArrayList<Calculation>();// history
history.add(new Calculation(5,5,Operator.PLUS));// add a new `Calculation` to our list
Then access the list with history.get(some_integer), based on your UI.
Could you just use a List containing a number of previously entered calculations? If you knew the maximum possible history size in advance, you could just stick with a normal array, but a List will give you more flexibility.
You need to store all the operations and results with an index here. Increase the index every time when you perform an operation.To retrieve the past operation, manipulate the index and you can get the values.You can use Collection API for storing the operations.
I've got what I thought was a simple android UI design problem but I've been going around in circles for a couple of days. I have a REST service that I'm downloading XML from and displaying the XML in a form in an android app. I have a web page built and am mimicking this with android, same options, same URLs being sent to the REST service whether from android or the web pages. With HTML I can easily create checkbox groups and radiobutton/dropdowns for various id/display items, so for instance, I can display a planet option as:
<select name="planet"><option value="0">Mercury</option></select>
I wanted to do something similar in android where I had a pair of values, one an id and the other the user-friendly text to display. So I decided to create an adapter using android.util.Pair:
public class PairView extends Pair<String, String> {
public PairView(String first, String second) {
super(first, second);
}
public String toString() {
return second;
}
}
public class PairAdapter extends ArrayAdapter<PairView> {
}
So now I can put my id in pair.first and what to display to the user in pair.second.
My problem comes in that some of these options will be single-selects and some will be multi-selects. In html, that's not an issue, just use a checkbox group for multi, and radio buttons/dropdowns for single selects. In android however, it seems it's not so straight forward. I tried using Spinners for the adapters, but Spinner seems to only allow single selection. AlertDialog.Builder allows for single and multi-selections, but curiously I don't see an option for using an adapter for the multi-selection, just for single selections.
I guess what I really want is a consistent look for all my options, with radio buttons displayed for single selections and checkboxes displayed for multi selections, via an adapter so I can get the id's from the Pair for the items selected.
What approach should I use? A custom spinner with code added for multi-selections? AlertDialog.Builder and somehow make it use an adapter for multi-selections? Just create a plain Alert and wrap a ListView in it? Another option that is (hopefully) simpler?
I feel like I'm missing something very basic here.
I had a similar situation in an app I was making so would share what I opted for. I had different type of questions and depending on that I removed and added things in my activity. For radio buttons I used with elements in it. For multiple choice questions I wanted a checkbox based view so I added an empty within my layout and in code added CheckBox(s) to it.
As for the caption and value, for radio buttons and checkboxes you can set display text by setText and add any object/value as a tag. So what I used to do was something like this:
CheckBox option = new CheckBox(MyActivity.this);
option.setText("Option 1");
option.setTag(10);
Later on when you get the selected option, you can simply get its tag and use its value.
This is just one way of doing it which I found simple. Hope this helps
Everything I've read about Intents talks about using them to push data, or to start one Activity from another Activity. I want to pull data from an Activity that's already running.
The Tab Layout tutorial at http://developer.android.com/resources/tutorials/views/hello-tabwidget.html illustrates what I want to do. (My app is doing some engineering calculations instead, but the tutorial code provides a good analogy to my app.) The tutorial creates an app with three tabs, and each tab hosts a separate activity.
To expand on the example in the tutorial, suppose I select an artist in the Artists tab/activity. I want to be able to select the Albums tab/activity and have it display all the albums featuring that artist.
It seems to me that I need to use an Intent to do this. All of the tutorials I've found assume that I would create a "See albums" Button in the Artists tab/activity, and that pressing the Button would execute an Intent that starts the Albums activity and passes artistName.
I DO NOT want to create that Button. Real estate on the Artists layout is precious, and I have a perfectly good Albums tab, AND the HelloTabWidget activity already contains an intent to create the Albums tab.
Besides, a user will want to skip back and forth between Album and Artist in order to change artist selections, and the tabs are a perfectly good way to do this. There's no need to complicate the UI with another button.
So how can I have the Albums activity PULL artistName from the Artists activity when the Albums tab is selected (or the Albums layout is displayed), rather than have the Artists activity START Albums and PUSH the artistName?
Equivalents I can think of from other programming worlds:
Global variables. Discouraged in Android devt, right? And if they do exist, what are they called?
A getter, like artistName = Artists.getArtistName(); . I get the feeling that it's not that easy.
Writing to, and reading from, a file - that is, mass storage or non-volatile memory. I don't need the artistName value to be permanent. It will be reset to null every time the user launches the application.
So how is it done in the Android world? Do I use an Intent - and if so, how?
Global variables were the right answer.
I thought Java discouraged their use, but a couple of links that appeared in the "Related" links on the right margin of this window mentioned them directly. One was "Android: How to declare global variables?" and the other was "how to pass value betweeen two tab in android". Both pointed to the Application Class as the place to define global variables and methods. Armed with this new knowledge, I found an article called "Android Application Class" on the Xoriant blog that expanded on the StackOverflow answers.
It's best to review those three links first. I need to add some tips to what those authors have said.
Your Application class has to be in its own separate file. (That might be a "duh" to some people, but not to everybody.) Here's a good framework for an example called Something.java:
public class Something extends Application {
// Put application wide (global) variables here
// Constants are final, so they don't have to be private
// But other variables should be declared private;
// use getters/setters to access them
public final boolean FEET = false;
public final boolean METERS = true;
private boolean units = FEET;
#Override
public void onCreate() {
super.onCreate();
// Put any application wide (global) initialization here
}
// Put application wide (global) methods here
public boolean getUnits() {
return units;
}
public void setUnits(boolean whichOne) {
units = whichOne;
}
}
I'm using Eclipse with the ADT plug-in, in Windows XP. Eclipse doesn't always behave properly if you edit XML code directly, so it's best to open AndroidManifest.xml, then select the Application tab and enter your application name in the Name field. You don't need to put a dot or period in front of the name. Just type in the name of your class, like "Globals" or "MyApplication" or whatever. (Note that this is the default application in your Manifest. You don't have to create a separate <application></application> tag.
This step may not be necessary on an actual Android device, but it was necessary for the emulator: you need to use the getApplicationContext() command in every onCreate() and every method that will be accessing the global variables and methods. I tried to put it outside of onCreate() with the rest of my activity wide variables, and it didn't work. Putting it inside every method seems wasteful, but both the emulator and the Android device work fine with it that way. Here's a sample showing how I used it:
public void fooBar() {
// Access to global variables and methods
final Something s = (Something)getApplicationContext();
// ...
// This next line demonstrates both a global method and a global variable
if (s.getUnits() == s.FEET) {
// do something with feet
} else {
// do something with meters instead
}
// ...
}
Those were the only hiccups I encountered. The three references that I have listed, taken together, are otherwise pretty complete.
sorry for stupid question. But really interesting and incomprehensible. In this session discussed about notifyDataSetChanged() method.
From documentation for this method - "called when the data set being observed has changed, and which when read contains the new state of the data". My English bad and I do not understand all. But I right if guess that method called when I need refresh ListView with new data set?
If I'm right then I'm confused. In the past and my first program I played with contacts api of android. And run some processing in an asynctask. At this time appeared dialog with progress bar and in the background, you could see how the state of ListView changed in real time. Data for ListView row changed via BindView.
Why? So I'm in something wrong. Explain please.
As i read it, BindView is only used with cursors, which are a specific type of a data set basically. You can have alternative data sets, there is for example an ArrayListAdapter in the API which uses an ArrayList as its dataset. In case that data set changes, notifyDataSetChanged() will have to be called to notify the list view that its bounds will have to be recalculated and its views have to be redrawn (and probably some more).
If you decide to write your own and create the possibility to modify the data shown in the list view through an adapter (one could imagine adding method like addObject(SomeObject o) in your home made adapter for example), then you'd call notifyDataSetChanged() in that method.
Similarly if you have a deleteObject(SomeObject x), if the remaining data set is larger than zero you'd call notifyDataSetChanged() or when the remaining data set is empty you'd call notifyDataSetInvalidated() which in turn will to some extra stuff like setting the so called empty view in the list if you have one specified.
I'm trying to port one of my iPhone apps over to the Android. It was all going along swimmingly until I came to AlertDialogs. In the iPhone app, sometimes there will be more than one alert to pass to the user. When this happens, the first alert dialog will come up, and when they click it away the next one will come up.
I can't seem to get more than one dialog box to come up like that in Android. Is it possible to display back to back AlertDialogs where a second one pops up as soon as the first is finished?
You execute 2 consecutive call to 'showDialog()' after eachother and the second will show after the 1st was dismissed:
showDialog(FIRST_DIALOG_ID);
showDialog(SECOND_DIALOG_ID);
Ofcourse you also have to implement onCreateDialog().
If you feel that you will be having multiple dialogs, one after another, you could create a custom class that holds all of the information for the alert, such as the title, text, icon, etc. From there, create an arraylist to store the custom class objects. When you are done with your first dialog, remove it from the arraylist, then check to see if there are any remaining dialogs that need to be presented.
The only issue you'll run into is that it will be much more difficult if you want to have different conditions in your Confirm and Cancel options.
public class DialogObject(){
String title;
String body;
String iconName; // or just an Image asset
}
ArrayList<DialogObject> dialogList = new ArrayList<>();
When a dialog is required, add it to the list if there is a dialog already on screen
dialogList.add(new DialogObject(param1, param2, param3));
This may not be the best way, but it is an option. The ArrayList will need to be in a separate class itself so you don't lose the data when moving from screen to screen.
For example - Note the "static" keyword.
public class DialogHolder(){
public static ArrayList<DialogObject> = new ArrayList<>();
}